[Gambas-user] Why Gambas is packaged in only one tarball without a configure script?

[Tobias Boege]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado wrote:
> Hi. In the page http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/howto/package , you give some 
> indications to the packagers. You want one package per component.
> 
> That's okay but I don't understand why are you bundling every component 
> in one "big" tarball without a configure script. You could create 
> individual tarballs with the configure script generated. That would make 
> quite easy to comply with your wishes.
> 
> Some packaging tools make pretty hard to split big tarballs in small 
> packages. Specially during the update to a new version.
> 
> Am I missing something? :)
> 

Since Gambas is maintained as a single big repository, we would need a
script which creates multiple tars from the repository after the fact.
The single big tarball is just how the base data is.

I'm not a packager for anything, but I believe something like this should
work, which the script would do for every new release of Gambas:

  1. Download the big tar.
  2. Do ./reconf-all to create the configure scripts in each directory.
  3. For each component (and possibly other parts you want to have a tar
     for) create the tar archive.

Now you have your tars with a configure script inside each.

Be sure to use the --dereference option to tar because some headers are
symlinked in the source tree. You see I *believe* something like this
would work, I don't know it. That's because there might be other gimmicks
like the symlinked files which make it difficult to split the tree apart.
You should play with it a little.

Regards,
Tobi

-- 
"There's an old saying: Don't change anything... ever!" -- Mr. Monk